wide world” it proclaimed, signed “Ron Eliran,” the Israeli singer then performing at The Finjan. I was so taken aback I hardly registered the sentiment, so perfectly in tune with mine. How dare he deface my kitchen wall. Immediately I tried to scrub it clean. But scrawled with an indelible marker, it refused to be eradicated. When I confronted Ron, he was unrepentant. “Why did you do that?” I moaned, “I can’t wash it off.”
“I did it because it had to be done.… It must never be washed off. Everyone who stays here should write something for the wall. It will be a wall of fame, a thank you to this wonderful kitchen.”
Shimon agreed and the wall of fame was bom. For me it became a celebration of my kitchen, of The Finjan, of the musicians, of my substitute for travel, of all of us together. After I left Montreal I never saw it again, but wherever I went I took that kitchen and its wall of fame with me.
Although the wall provided happy recollections, it evoked one disturbing memory which continued to haunt me. When the now-famous blues musician, John Lee Hooker, performed at The Finjan, spending wonderful hours in our kitchen, I asked him, as a matter of course, to sign the wall. I was taken aback by his adamant refusal. “Everyone writes something on the wall,” I protested. But he was unyielding. “Please John,” I urged, unable to fathom this stubborn refusal in someone so amenable, “I really want you to sign the wall.… I want to remember you being here.” But, uncharacteristically, he continued to refuse, and, characteristically, I continued to twist his arm. “Why John? Why won’t you sign the wall?” I pleaded.
Finally he offered a lame, “I don’t know what to write.”
“That’s no problem,” I said with a sense of deliverance. At that time he had a hit song in circulation called Boom Boom. “Just write ‘Boom Boom’ … nothing else … just ‘Boom Boom’ … that’ll be great.” Eroded by my insistence, he acquiesced. “Good man,” I said, handing him the felt pen. He clutched it like a child grasping a too-fat crayon, and in slow awkward letters painfully scratched an M … an O … another O and a misshapen N facing backwards. Suddenly it hit me. He was illiterate. He couldn’t write. And I had forced humiliation upon him. Mortified, I watched him press another tortured M … O … O and a wounded N into the wall.
“Boom! Boom!” he smiled broadly, his ordeal over.
“Thanks John, I really appreciate that,” I said, severely chastened. “Now I’ll always think of you when I look at the wall.” And I always did, but with a stinging shame.
At first I intended finishing my university degree in Ireland since I was working on an Irish writer. But after attending the Yeats Summer School and spending some time in Dublin, I realised this was not a good idea. It would be too difficult for a woman on her own with a child to live in Ireland. In a country where divorce was not permitted, where men lived with their mothers until they married in their late thirties or even mid forties, and where sexual repression was rampant, I would be too high profile, up for grabs. Even being in Ireland without Ronit gave rise to a plague of curiosity, making me feel as though my bones were being picked. Although I loved Ireland and the Irish, the poetry, the talk, the music, the hilarity, the madness, I knew I couldn’t live there. It was too introverted, too incestuous, to give me the anonymity I desired.
I had already suffered unwanted attention in Montreal where the English-speaking community was relatively small and where Shimon was relatively well known because of The Finjan years and his subsequent success as a performer. Everyone knew we had parted, that he was living with someone else. Strangers would express sorrow at our separation. The looks of sympathy and commiseration had been difficult to bear, they were like eulogies at my funeral. I decided on London where no one was interested in me, except for Ruth, my only friend there, and Rosy, whom I had met at the Yeats Summer School and recognised as a soul mate.
I had written my Masters thesis on W.B. Yeats’ Plays For Dancers, excited by the discovery that Yeats, like myself, was impelled by dance, that it was central to his concept of drama. His fascination with dance and the plays themselves so impressed me that, determined to disprove the critics’ claim that Yeats was the greatest twentieth century poet but a failed dramatist, I had convinced The Centaur Theatre, the principal English-speaking theatre in Montreal, to stage two of his dance plays with myself as choreographer and assistant director. That’s how I came to meet Brian Stavetchney. He was the main actor-dancer in the plays and quickly became devoted to Yeats and to me. The more we worked together the more I realised how perfectly suited he was to creating the elusive qualities Yeats was after, like evoking those emotions which “haunt the edge of trance,” those perceptions outside the scope of reason, the “intimacies, ecstasies and anguish of soul life,” the “images that remind us of vast passions.” Yeats wanted his theatre to call up the world of imagination and spirit, to be magical.
Brian had a magic about him. He was spectacular to look at with a shock of frizzy sunflower hair that framed his head like a halo. His long oval face, high cheekbones and startling blue eyes were so striking that even in repose he appeared to be on stage. His face was always alive as though sensing nuances the rest of us were unable to perceive, vibrations we couldn’t feel, like a finely attuned animal, alert, responsive, tuned into another dimension. His body was beautiful, long and lean and golden. It was eloquent, able to communicate when he was silent, and he moved it like a dancer even when he was still. He didn’t speak much but when he did speak his voice was soft and resonant, rich and melodic on stage. I came to see him as some aspect of Yeats, some incarnation Yeats would have desired. Much later, in the months he was in London, it was Brian who insisted on us forming the Yeats Theatre Company and performing several of the dance plays, the first professional production in London since Yeats’ death, and attended by T.S. Eliot’s wife, Valerie, and Ninette de Valois, founder of The Royal Ballet Company, among others. I was merely impelled by his energy. Not long after Shimon and I separated Brian and I became lovers, and when I left Montreal with Ronit, he came with us.
My plan was for the three of us to spend the first part of the summer in Greece on the island of Lesbos with my closest friend Rachel, and then for Brian and I to go on to Ireland to attend the Yeats Summer School, for him an exciting bonus. Rachel, Irving and their son David were spending the summer on Lesbos. Irving, considered Canada’s leading poet, had been my teacher at university, the inspiration behind my pursuit of Yeats. Leonard Cohen, David’s godfather, was also expected. Irving was his mentor and contact with Irving gave him sustenance. Brian, who admired both men and who was a devout reader of their poetry, was thrilled by the possibility of meeting them.
Ronit looked forward to Lesbos. She would be seeing David whom she sorely missed since Rachel and Irving had moved to Toronto the previous year. Although several years older than David they were very close, each like the brother or sister the other never had. I sorely missed Rachel. Since childhood I always had a best friend, friends being the most valued thing in my life. But Rachel was more than a best friend, more than a sister, there was an empathy between us, a twinned connection, that even strangers recognised. Although we looked nothing like each other, she was fair and I dark, although we spoke English with different accents, people confused us, calling her Niema and me Rachel, forgetting which of us they had talked to, which of us had said what, which child belonged to whom.
We never exhausted our times together, always had more to reveal. We shared our most intimate moments, stood by each other through every crisis, were each other’s main source of comfort. When Rachel was devastated by the sudden death of a good friend, Irving sent me to be with her. When Shimon decided he wanted to live with someone else, he first told Rachel asking her how best to tell me. I was with Rachel when she gave birth to David, when she fed him his first spoon of solid food, when he locked himself in a car for which there was no key.
It was never an imposition, a burden, to listen to the repetitive agonised sagas of her life with Irving — the much older man she had pursued and was living with — it was a privilege.
